📖 Ancient document

Didache: the teaching of the twelve apostles

A small manual of the early church on the "two ways," baptism, fasting, the Lord's Prayer and the Supper — perhaps the oldest Christian writing outside the New Testament.

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Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 1782: Greek fragment of the Didache (4th century).Domínio público (Wikimedia Commons)

Date: written c. AD 70–120; copy from 1056
Found in: Library of the Monastery of the Holy Sepulchre, Constantinople (1873)
Where it is: Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem (Codex Hierosolymitanus 54)

The church fathers quoted a book called the "Teaching of the Apostles," but it seemed lost. In 1873, the Orthodox bishop Philotheos Bryennios found the entire text, in Greek, in a codex copied by a scribe named Leo in 1056, in the library of the Monastery of the Holy Sepulchre in Constantinople. He published the work in 1883. The manuscript is today in the Greek patriarchate of Jerusalem.

The writing is short (16 chapters). It begins with the "two ways," that of life and that of death, full of echoes of the Sermon on the Mount. Then it teaches to baptize ("in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit," preferably in running water), to fast on Wednesdays and Fridays, to pray the Lord's Prayer three times a day, to celebrate the Supper with prayers of thanksgiving, to receive traveling apostles and prophets (and to unmask the false ones, who ask for money) and ends speaking of the Lord's return.

The date is debated: there are those who place it already between AD 50 and 70 and there are those who think of 110–120; many speak today of "around the year 100." The copy is medieval, but ancient quotations show that it is faithful.

Why it matters: it is a window into the life of the churches soon after the apostles — simple, centered on the teaching of Jesus, on the common table and on the expectation of Christ's return.

There are two ways: one of life and one of death, and great is the difference between the two ways. The way of life is this: first, you shall love God, who created you; second, your neighbor as yourself.

Didache 1:1-2, my own translation from the Greek (the Greek text is in the public domain).

In the Bible

📖 Matthew 7:13-14 📖 Matthew 22:37-39 📖 Matthew 6:9-13 📖 Matthew 28:19

Sources to check

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